AI for Prospecting: How ChatGPT is Revolutionizing Sales and Marketing

Sales and marketing professionals are using AI to boost their productivity and effectiveness. Chatbots like ChatGPT are helping to generate tailored content, identify target audiences, create buyer personas and craft effective marketing strategies. Some practitioners share how they are leveraging ChatGPT’s natural language capabilities to gain a competitive edge.

Rafa Gandia works as a marketing analyst at FindThatLead, where he assists companies in achieving growth through the implementation of outbound marketing strategies. FindThatLead is a company known for providing businesses with intelligent sales prospecting tools. It helps automate the sales process and generate high-quality leads.

Rafa wanted to improve the chances of conversion by making each email feel like a one-on-one conversation with the customer. Using ChatGPT, Rafa easily builds and transforms his cold emails, resulting in a more personalized and engaging tone. This not only saved him time and effort but also increased the effectiveness of his email marketing strategy.

Rafa came up with a three level approach to use ChatGPT.

• Level 1 - Beginner: You ask for what you want without any specific context.

• Level 2 - Context: You give it a context and ask it to roleplay.

• Level 3 - Roleplaying context + proofreading: You ask it to refine the output.

Rafa started with the following prompt at level 1. He defined the target audience as CEOs and CMOs of B2B companies in Argentina and commanded ChatGPT to write a cold email for his target audience.

Input Prompt: You are going to launch a cold emailing campaign to a list of 102 Prospects whose target are CEOs and CMOs of B2B companies in Argentina. I need you to write a cold email to them, our service is a lead generation agency.

At level 2, Rafa suggested the following steps to ChatGPT to write an effective cold email:

1. Act as outbound marketing specialist.

2. Understand the needs of the agency for this campaign.

3. Use techniques like storytelling, copywriting, outbound marketing amongst others.

4. Understand the target audience.

5. Prepare it to write a cold email.

Input Prompt: I want you to act as a consultant specialized in Outbound Marketing, I will give you details about a company that needs help designing and developing a cold emails to their target market, your role is to write the best sales cold email possible. You must use your knowledge about Storytelling, Copywriting, Outbound Marketing, Cold Emailing, Linkedin Prospecting, etc to write a cold email, my first request is "We are FTL Growth Agency, a Lead Generation Company focused on generating leads to our clients via Cold Emailing and LinkedIn Prospecting, we want to send a cold email to a list of 102 prospect,composed of CEOs and CMOs of B2B companies in Argentina. We need you to write a cold email to send to that list."

At level 3, Rafa started fine tuning the outputs by givsing instructions to make it sound less formal and commercial. He suggested it to adopt a direct call to action and propose a specific date.

Input Prompt: Be more direct and brief, don't try to sound comercial. don't say "Dear", be less formal. Be more direct in the CTA, try to close and propose an specific date yourself.

Thibaut Souyris is the CEO & Founder of SalesLabs, a company that trains and coaches B2B sales teams in the tech industry. He specializes in inside sales teams and has served B2B customers such as Amazon and Shopify.

Thibaut demonstrates that sales professionals can gain a competitive advantage in their prospecting efforts and increase their chances of converting potential clients using prospect research. He suggested feeding the resume of a potential client to GPT-4, to analyze the profile and gain a better understanding of the prospect's skills, experience, and career goals. With this PDF file, sales professionals can take a closer look at the prospect's work history, education, skills, and other relevant information, allowing them to tailor their sales pitch to better align with the prospect's needs and interests.

Step 1: Feed the prospect's resume into GPT-4 for quick analysis. Visit the prospect's LinkedIn profile. Click on "More" and select "Save as PDF" to save their profile as a PDF file.

Step 2: Copy the PDF file of the prospect's LinkedIn profile and paste it into ChatGPT. Ask ChatGPT to skim the resume for personalization elements, such as interests or previous work experience. Provide ChatGPT with the necessary context about what you want to do, such as tailor your sales pitch to the prospect. List the specific problems that your product or service solves for prospects, so ChatGPT can suggest personalized approaches to address them.

Input Prompt: Here's the LinkedIn profile of a prospect. I'm trying to get this prospect to reply to my LinkedIn messages and I need to mention an element of his profile that is relevant to problems I help solve:

• {problem 1}

• {problem 2}

• {problem 3}

Now find me 5 elements from his resume that I could mention to catch their attention. Here's the resume: {PDFContent}

The output came as following:

Step 3: Look for an interesting personalization element in the prospect's LinkedIn profile or resume. Use that personalization element to catch the prospect's attention in your message. Incorporate the personalization element in a natural and relevant way to increase the likelihood of engagement from the prospect. Here’s a message he came up with for his prospect.

By using this approach, Thibaut saved a significant amount of time in his prospect research. In less than 30 seconds, he was able to skim through the prospect's profile and use GPT-4 to personalize his messages at scale.

Thibaut has developed a framework to identify the pain points of the prospects, main symptoms, generate email subject, content and marketing playbook. Here’s the step by step process he followed:

Step 1: Find prospects' problems - Instruct ChatGPT to roleplay as your prospect and provide a list of their top challenges for the current year.

Input Prompt: "Act like [prospect name], the [job title] at [company]. List your top 3 challenges for 2023. Bullet point and concise answer only."

Step 2: Find problems symptoms - Instruct ChatGPT to provide a list of symptoms for each challenge to obtain more detailed information.

Input Prompt: "Now list 3 symptoms for each challenge above. Bullet point and short answers only."

Step 3: Generate email subject lines - Instruct ChatGPT to role play as a Sales Development Representative (SDR) and generate outbound prospecting email subject lines that focus on teasing the prospect's curiosity. Please provide reference email subjects and clear instructions to achieve this goal.

Input Prompt: Here are 10 email subject lines that got my attention:

• [FirstName], quick question

• Your thoughts

• [Prospect's job title] - a few tips

• RE: Follow up

• Need help?

• Thoughts?

• I might be wrong

• Open to this?

• Idea for [pain point]

• Idea for [prospect challenge]

Act like a top-performing SDR and generate 10 new outbound prospecting email subject lines based on the ones above. Be short, creative, and focus on teasing the prospect's curiosity.

Step 4: Generate cold outbound messages - Provide the 9 touchpoint framework outbound sequence to ChatGPT, which includes a question, teaser, and call to action. Based on this framework, instruct ChatGPT to build a cold outreach message.

Input Prompt: Now I'd like to build a 9 touchpoint outbound sequence in order to get Stephen to reply to my prospecting.

I use the following framework for each message:

• Question: A question based on one of the 9 symptoms above

• Teaser: A potential resource to help alleviate the symptom mentioned in the question

• CTA: A simple question to get a reply

Here's an example for the first symptom you listed:

• Question: How do you avoid and inconsistent of undefined sales process?

• Teaser: If you're interested, I can share a 3-step checklist to help you audit your sales process.

• CTA: Worth checking it?

Now based on the framework I shared, build a cold outreach message for each symptom listed above. For the teaser, don't mention a case study or webinar. Instead make it more appealing by calling it a resource, checklist, playbook, framework.

Always introduce the teaser with a variation of "If you're interested, I can share a [teaser]" or "If you're into it, I can share a [teaser]".

Step 5: Turn a marketing resource into a prospecting resource - Provide ChatGPT with instructions to role play as an online marketer and turn email content and context into a playbook.

Input Prompt: Act like an online marketer and turn the following content into a playbook: {summary}

Alex Velinov is Chief Technology Officer at Tag Digital. He’s a digital marketing professional with keen interest in analytics and AI. At Tag Digital, his role involves data-driven digital advertising campaigns to increase revenue and attendance for events.

In sales and marketing, identifying the target audience and creating buyer personas are crucial as they provide a clear understanding of the customer's needs, preferences, and pain points. This knowledge enables businesses to develop targeted marketing strategies, tailor product offerings, and improve customer experience, ultimately leading to increased sales and customer loyalty.

Alex's goal was to leverage ChatGPT's capabilities in identifying the target audience and creating buyer personas for effective marketing of a hypothetical product called StyloBot - an AI-powered personal shopping assistant app.

To kickstart this process, Alex tasked ChatGPT to play the role of a marketing expert and take into account various factors such as age, gender, income level, education, occupation, location, interests and behaviors, psychographics, pain points and challenges, goals and aspirations, buying behavior, and communication preferences. The ultimate objective was to identify the ideal customers for StyloBot and craft a focused marketing strategy to engage with them.

Input Prompt: Act as a marketing expert. I will provide you with product details. You will provide target audience. Consider demographics - age, gender, income level, education, occupation, location, interests and behaviours, psychographic, pain points and challenges, goals and aspirations, buying behaviour and communication preferences.

Product details: An Al-powered personal shopping assistant app called StyloBot. The assistant helps you find clothes that fit perfectly and match your style

ChatGPT generated the result in six categories, namely, (1) demographics, (2) interests and behaviors, (3) psychographic, (4) pain points and challenges, and (5) goals and aspirations, and (6) buying behavior and communication preferences.

Alex's next step after gathering information on the target audience was to create buyer personas. To accomplish this, Alex tasked ChatGPT with providing details such as the name, demographics, location, income, education, occupation, interests and behaviors, pain points and challenges, goals and aspirations, buying behavior, and communication preferences for each persona.

Input Prompt: Act as a marketing expert. Develop 5 buyer personas. Include name, demographics, location, income, education, occupation, interests and behaviours, pain points and challenges,  goals and aspirations, buying behaviour, communication preferences

ChatGPT and other AI tools show enormous promise for sales and marketing. As the examples in this article demonstrate, AI can help generate high-quality content at scale, provide insights into customers and their needs, and suggest targeted marketing strategies. While AI will not replace human judgment and expertise entirely, it can boost productivity and effectiveness, enabling sales and marketing professionals to focus on the high-value, creative work that still requires a human touch. The future of sales and marketing looks increasingly automated and data-driven, with AI as a key driver of that transformation

• If you want to learn more about Alex's experiments with ChatGPT, you can read about them in his LinkedIn post.

• If you want to learn more about Thibaut's experiments with ChatGPT, you can read about them in his LinkedIn post and Twitter post.

• If you want to learn more about Rafa's experiments with ChatGPT, you can read about them in his blog post.